On the Surface, Microsoft's "Kludgey" Tablet is Hardly Competition, Says HP
Microsoft's hardware partners continue to take potshots at the company's Surface tablet. Last week,
Acer warned Microsoft
that delving into hardware is like "hard rice and "is not so easy to
eat" (no joke, though something may have been lost in translation), and
now HP is piling on the criticism, calling
Surface a "slow" and "kludgey" solution. HP credited the press for hyping up a tablet that otherwise isn't very competitive.
"I'd hardly call Surface competition," Todd Bradley, head of HP's PC business, told
IDG Enterprise in an interview,
according to CiteWorld.com.
"[Reason] one, very limited distribution. It tends to be slow and a
little kludgey as you use it. It's expensive. Holistically, the press
has made a bigger deal out of Surface than what the world has chosen to
believe."
HP's last real attempt at the consumer tablet market was
the ill-fated TouchPad, a promising webOS tablet that was perhaps
priced too high to woo buyers away from the iPad. These days, HP is more
focused on enterprise slates, and that isn't about to change.
"We're
not entering the consumer tablet fray any time soon," Bradley added.
"We'll be doing something next year, but you won't see a consumer tablet
from HP before Christmas. You'll see convertibles that are focused on
how you use the device, keyboard, clamshell."
Bradley also expressed interest in getting into the highly competive phone business, but hasn't yet formulated a strategy.